Fifty-plus years of cuts and counseling

Certain touches in Gil Cesena's Wilson Way shop confirm he has been barbering an unusually long time. Like the yellow rotary phone hanging on the wall. Or the Nehi Soda machine.

Michael Fitzgerald

Certain touches in Gil Cesena's Wilson Way shop confirm he has been barbering an unusually long time. Like the yellow rotary phone hanging on the wall. Or the Nehi Soda machine.

Probably the clincher is the stack of his customers' obituaries.

"Just reminder of what they looked like," Cesena said. "Sometimes other people ask when they died. So I just pull it out and tell 'em."

The white-haired Cesena was sitting in his chair, alone, idly watching TV weather (another hot one in the Valley) when a visitor entered to ask if he'd really been in the same spot for 54 years.

"Yeah, I got here in October of 1959," said Cesena, who's 75. His longtime acquaintances rib him about this. "A lot of 'em say, 'You still alive? I thought you died a long time ago.' "

On the contrary. Cesena has been the constant as his stretch of Wilson Way changed over the decades from a thriving and close-knit commercial district to a local synonym for blight.

There are still many good businesses on Wilson Way. And good people. Traffic remains high. But it's not what it was when Cesena moved into the Growers Barber Shop.

Back then, the area behind his building was a giant produce market. Farmers - growers, if you prefer - came in as early as 2 a.m. from the countryside. Unloading produce into rented stalls, they sold to produce buyers for supermarkets and to individual customers. A hive of heartland activity.

Everybody repaired to Chet's, the corner café where two sisters cooked pita and served open-faced sandwiches with gravy and peas, and the "Mayor of Wilson Way," Pete Busalacchi, held court and played dice from his station behind the bar.

Across the street (which until 1964 was Highway 99) truckers lived at the Lido Hotel, the guys who ran tomatoes to the canneries or cherries to San Francisco or peaches to L.A. Or the guys whose wives had kicked them out.

It was Italian mostly, but also Latino, even Japanese. A lot of them grew up in the southeast neighborhoods where old paisanos crushed wine by the barrel in their basements.

Cesena remembers spreading the pulp in the field next door after the crush and sampling the wine as reward. "We got our taste of it."

And the corner markets sold Genoa salami, olives, anchovies and Cacio de Roma cheese, and the kind Italian grocer gave kids a free chunk of bologna now and then.

"It was basically all working class," Cesena said of his 'hood, Scotts Avenue at Sierra Nevada. "Real close. You didn't even lock the doors."

During the war, his dad worked longshore at the port. His mom, from Jalisco, kept house. After high school he joined the Air Force for a four-year stint.

When he got back - in the late 1950s - he joined the bricklayers union but was laid off. After barber college, he apprenticed a year on Charter Way, then moved to the Growers Barber Shop.

And stayed.

"I still got the farmers - well, they're thinned out a lot," Cesena said. "When I got here, they were in their 40s. It's gone through a couple generations."

And the name has changed, to Growers Styling Salon.

His customers are guys like Archie Sparkman, 85. Sparkman has been Cesena's customer for, "Thirty years, I think. At least." He drives in from Valley Springs.

"Old habits are hard to break," Sparkman said. "I know what I'm going to get when I go in there. A nice, pleasant personality. We talk a lot, joke a lot, talk about old times, and how we're outliving all our old buddies."

Well, not all. Dan Lovecchio still brokers produce out back.

"He's a good guy, and he knows how cut your hair right," Lovecchio said. "Most of my men go there to get their hair cut. My two kids, they got their first haircuts there."

Cesena isn't happy about Wilson Way's decline. Like the streetwalkers who saunter past his shop, though most usually work farther north by the old motels and a block over on Sierra Nevada Street.

"The ones on Sierra Nevada, they're usually druggies," Cesena said. "I feel sorry for the people walking there with kids, pushing strollers and two or three kids tagging along."

Business has slowed. "Sometimes I sit here for two, three hours and say, 'What are you doing here? You could be doing something else.' "

But he has no plans to retire.

"I don't know. I feel pretty good. I just had a goin'-over on my heart, and it's all right."

Besides, "I enjoy the people that come in," Cesena said, recalling one farmer. "I remember he came in and said, 'My wife left me.' He said, 'She went off with another bozo.' "

Cesena advised divorce. And he further counseled: "Don't show any emotion. Treat her with respect. And don't take it out on the kids."

"And he did exactly that. Two of his kids have graduated from college, one's in college in San Diego. He comes in and I say, 'Well? Did you fall in love yet?' "